Directed by John Badham, a Hollywood hack with a decent commercial track record (Saturday Night Fever, Short Circuit, War Games, Stakeout), and starring such name actors as Jason Patric and Irene Jacob, Incognito would seem too big to go straight to video. Luckily, though, the enormous cost of marketing and distributing theatrical films has tended to weed out mid-budgeted mediocrities like Incognito, leaving the film with a more appropriate life as video-rental fodder. Patric stars as a brilliant American art forger who runs afoul of a group of amoral international art dealers, and ends up being framed for murder. Along the way, he seduces, alienates, and ends up kidnapping Irene Jacob, who is, conveniently, a brilliant art professor and the only person in the world who can detect Patric's forgery. Also on hand as Patric's father is Rod Steiger, showing up once in a while to counsel the younger man on the ways of the overactor. Both a dimwitted meditation on the nature of art and a lackluster thriller, Incognito is such a listless, unsuspenseful film that it probably won't even dawn on the viewer that Badham is trying to make a Hitchcockian innocent-man-on-the-run film until well into the second hour. Until that point, Badham is reduced to trying vainly to generate excitement with such scenes as a thrilling buying-art-supplies montage sequence. Patric is a talented actor, and he can be brilliant when he's given good material. But, as Speed 2: Cruise Control proved, Patric can be boring when he's playing standard action heroes. Jacob, likewise, was riveting in her films with Krzysztof Kieslowski, but here, she's both filmed unflatteringly and unconvincing as either a brilliant intellectual or a woman enamored of the loutish Patric.